Tanya Lokot, ‘Socially Mediated Visibility and Augmented Witnessing in Ukraine’s Euromaidan Protest’

Ukraine’s Euromaidan protest (2013–2014) was a spectacular event that attracted significant media and public attention, due in no small part to the extensive use of social media by protesters. In this talk, based on ethnographic research conducted during and after the protest, Tanya Lokot will focus on how the protest’s visibility and the witnessing practices of its participants were mediated by networked technologies such as Facebook and Twitter. Crucially, socially mediated witnessing of protests like Euromaidan provided for a ‘bottom-up’ making of the event, bypassing official channels and allowing for multiple protest temporalities, narratives, representations, memories and histories. This talk will examine how agency afforded by social media is vital in societies where access to traditional media and memory-making institutions is limited.

Lokot is an assistant professor at the School of Communications at Dublin City University in Ireland.

This event is sponsored by the UNC Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies.